Particles and fields in fluid turbulence

The understanding of fluid turbulence has considerably progressed in recent years. The application of the methods of statistical mechanics to the description of the motion of fluid particles, i.e. to the Lagrangian dynamics, has led to a new quantitative theory of intermittency in turbulent transport. The first analytical description of anomalous scaling laws in turbulence has been obtained. The underlying physical mechanism reveals the role of statistical integrals of motion in non-equilibrium systems. For turbulent transport, the statistical conservation laws are hidden in the evolution of groups of fluid particles and arise from the competition between the expansion of a group and the change of its geometry. By breaking the scale-invariance symmetry, the statistically conserved quantities lead to the observed anomalous scaling of transported fields. Lagrangian methods also shed new light on some practical issues, such as mixing and turbulent magnetic dynamo.Comment: 165 pages, review article for Rev. Mod. Phy

Transition to Chaos in a Shell Model of Turbulence

We study a shell model for the energy cascade in three dimensional turbulence at varying the coefficients of the non-linear terms in such a way that the fundamental symmetries of Navier-Stokes are conserved. When a control parameter $\epsilon$ related to the strength of backward energy transfer is enough small, the dynamical system has a stable fixed point corresponding to the Kolmogorov scaling. This point becomes unstable at $\epsilon=0.3843...$ where a stable limit cycle appears via a Hopf bifurcation. By using the bi-orthogonal decomposition, the transition to chaos is shown to follow the Ruelle-Takens scenario. For $\epsilon > 0.3953..$ the dynamical evolution is intermittent with a positive Lyapunov exponent. In this regime, there exists a strange attractor which remains close to the Kolmogorov (now unstable) fixed point, and a local scaling invariance which can be described via a intermittent one-dimensional map.Comment: 16 pages, Tex, 20 figures available as hard cop